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“This is perfect. All my family together,” Darian said, raising her glass soon after dinner started. “I wish your mother could have been here, too, Finn.”
His mother had married a widower and moved away. She and her husband spent part of the holidays with him and part with her husband’s grandkids.
“I wish dear Tom could be here,” Linda said, raising her glass and looking at her daughter. “Hopefully, he will be next year. Maybe you’ll make me happy before—a wedding, a grandchild, I don’t care about the order anymore.”
Finn’s heart almost stopped. He leaned forward and glanced at Jane, who sat on the same side as him, but with people between them. She was the color of the tablecloth.
“Mom!” she said.
“At least you’re embarrassing her and not me this time,” Bert said jokingly to his wife, and everyone laughed.
Everyone, but Finn and Jane.
It was the first time since they had sat down that their glances crossed paths. She averted her gaze immediately after.
Max helped end the evening early by throwing up soon after dinner.
They left early, and when he made his way to the door, holding Max, who was five years old then, Jane passed by with an empty salad bowl on her way to the kitchen. With his free hand, he grabbed hers. He shouldn’t have, but he couldn’t stop himself. He was a selfish sonofabitch.
“Take care, Jane,” he half-whispered so only she could hear him using that name.
She gave his hand a little squeeze that told him more than words ever could. It was as if she had squeezed his heart. She then freed it from his and brushed it over Max’s hair, whose head rested on his shoulder. He knew what she was telling him beyond the words she uttered.
“I always do. You, too, Finn.” It was her way to tell him that she knew that everything he had done was for his child’s sake.
That year, he bought Jane Austen’s Persuasion and read it clandestinely, concealing it in his car like other men hide porn.
Anne.
No blizzard saved him two years later from seeing her with Tom.
